The COA stipends are for ALL scholarship athletes in those conferences that said they were. PAC 12 and B1G 10 are awarding them to all, and the conferences have autonomy to award it in any way they want - each scholarship athlete could get full COA stipends, those splitting a scholarship could get 100% or split it, up to the school/conference. Mountain West, which is not a Power 5, is giving them to all athletes in proportion to their scholarship, so if a swimmer has a 20% scholarship, he’ll get 20% of the COA stipends. It kind of depends how much money the school has to give out or what the conference requires the school to do.
dstark, I don’t know what you are talking about for ‘gifts’. Those are specifically banned by the NCAA. The students cannot receive money for signing autographs, even if it is a ‘athletic dept function.’ Boosters cannot give gifts to the students, only to the athletic department and there are rules about how that money can be used. Illegal gifts? Not if the NCAA finds out about them - that’s why they are illegal. The stipends are not gifts, they are part of the athletic department budgets.
The IRS certain does have rules about how the stipend will be taxed - as unearned income if it is not used for QEE of tuition, fees, books. It is no different than it was last year if an athlete -or ANY student- received scholarship money in excess of QEE, it’s unearned income to which the kiddy tax applies if the student is a dependent. Many full ride scholarship students receive more money than tuition, books, room and board, and fees, such as Pell grants, SEOG, outside awards, Elks club, etc. All of these scholarships and grants are treated just like any money received by any student for tax purposes. The stipend will just be one more such award. QEE is not taxed, everything else it.
The school is not a tax accountant. There is no withholding of part of the scholarship to pay taxes. The entire scholarship amount is applied to the student’s bill, and the overage is refunded to the student. Student taxes are not the responsibility of the school. If the government wants to withhold a portion of the Pell grant for taxes, the government needs to do that before sending the money to the school - for all students, not just athletes.
northwesty, there are only 6 headcount sports, but there are a few sports where full scholarships are given to almost the entire team or a number of players get full scholarships especially as seniors. Mens and womens ice hockey and women’s crew are a few where the number of scholarships can almost equal the number on the team.
But it is up to the conferences. Most seem to be giving the COA stipends to every athlete at least in proportion to their scholarships, which may be only a few hundred dollars in some cases.
Colorado state is using the money it gets from UFlorida buying its football coach’s contract to fund the stipends for all athletes.
@twoinanddone do you know if all of the Power Five schools are going to do full COA across the board? Or is it just the Big Ten and Pac 12? I wonder if they will just increase the amount they give kids on partials or start offering more kids schollys?
I only know of the PAC 12 and B1G10, and both announced that all scholarship athletes will receive a stipends, but I don’t know if all students will receive 100%, just that all scholarship athletes will get some stipend. Colorado State announce the amount they were giving and that it would cost $1M per year, but then backed off a little and said stipends for partial scholarships would be in the percentage of the scholarship. It’s rather new for everyone and there are going to be some adjustments in these early years.
Last thing I read was that the SEC and ACC conferences were still discussing the matter, but I can’t imagine they won’t offer them for this year.
The ability to give a stipend didn’t increase the number of scholarships in any sport. If the sport is fully funded for scholarships, that’s it for that team. They can’t just throw the stipend amount into the pot and give 13 scholarships if the limit is 12. I think if a particular scholarship is divided 5 ways, each of those athletes will also get 20% of the stipend. Could the coach then decide to split the scholarships 6 ways? I guess.
Yeah, that was what I was talking about. It would seem, in the case of partials, that effectively what you are doing is raising the scholarship limits. I doubt that a kid cares if he gets a 20% scholarship and a stipend or a 25% scholarship and no stipend, as long as the dollars are equivalent. How much that really changes things, who knows.
i believe all of the P5 have committed to COA at least for football. I know there is an issue in the SEC because Saban is pissed that the COA for Alabama is around 3k and Tennessee’s is over 5k. Les Miles also gave an interview saying that they should include the cost of a computer in the COA at LSU, so a number of coaches want an across the board figure for the conference cost of attendance. Several coaches in the Big Ten want to do the same. Given that the three marquee football programs in the Big Ten all are in the bottom half of the conference in cost of attendance, I would assume that something would get done there. That is one of the reasons it surprised me when you said the Big Ten had agreed to COA for all athletes. I would have thought they would have at least waited until the end of this month when they have to decide what the COA number will be.
“The ability to give a stipend didn’t increase the number of scholarships in any sport. If the sport is fully funded for scholarships, that’s it for that team. They can’t just throw the stipend amount into the pot and give 13 scholarships if the limit is 12. I think if a particular scholarship is divided 5 ways, each of those athletes will also get 20% of the stipend. Could the coach then decide to split the scholarships 6 ways? I guess.”
Sure you could do that. Pre-COA, a coach in a non-head count sport could take one $100 of scholarship value and give 4 kids a 25% schollie worth $25 each. Once that schollie gets COA-bumped to $125 of value, he could give 5 kids a 20% schollie worth $25 each.
But the COA is totally not about the kids/sports that use partial schollies. They really only make sense where the kid already has 100% of tuition, room, board, books paid for – that’s primarily football, mens hoops and womens hoops. The idea is that the kid has a “full ride”, but it isn’t really completely “full” since the kid still has to pay for transportation, computer, living expenses.
I don’t think the stipend at most schools is going to be enough to start splitting the scholarships more and more. If a scholarship is worth $20k and a stipend is $3k (poor, poor Nick Saban), splitting $20k by 4 gives each $5000 but splitting $23k by 5 gives only $4.6k. I really don’t think schools will do that -coaches don’t want the headache. There is also a point where some students would do better to reject the athletic scholarship and take a need based one.
The announcement I remember was PAC 12, with the conference saying every scholarship athlete would get a stipend, but the conference didn’t say how much and I inferred it was left to the schools to use the COA set for all students. It might be cheaper to live in say Eugene than in LA, but the transportation to Eugene could be double that to LA for the average student at that university.
@twoinanddone, the way I am thinking about partials and COA is like this. Let’s say you are Alabama, and are a fully funded athletic program who will provide cost of attendance across the board and not just head count sports and female equivalents (no idea if that is true, but assume so). On the men’s side, after you pay your full COA to the headcount guys you still have 120 some odd $3,000 stipends to split up. That is an additional $360,000 in scholarship money to give out in a given year if you want to. With an in state cost for tuition, room, board and fees of $12,500, that gives you the equivalent of 28 more scholarships. So, if right now you have a baseball team with 12 scholarships (I know it is 11.7 but I suck at math) and 24 kids each on a 50% ride, then assuming they are in state their grant is worth $6,250. If the AD says we are giving COA to everyone, then starting next year I can put those 24 kids on a 40% ride plus COA and their grant is worth $6,200 ($5,000 scholarship + $1,200 cost of attendance) and I can pick up 2.6 more scholarships, or basically 6 more kids. I would assume those simple calculations are worth doing if I can pick up one more left handed pitcher every year plus a utility guy every other.
And yes, Alabama may be an outlier because their in state costs are so low. But the higher the football guys push the COA to compete for blue chip recruits, the more advantage can be gained by these kinds of calculations. The schools who are really going to get hurt if COA is an across the board thing are the private schools. A $3,000 cost of attendance stipend means a lot less on a 50k tuition bill than a 15k one.
@northwesty, I agree. If you read the COA proposals from the NCAA meeting last year it is obvious they were intended to apply to head count sports. Which makes sense, since that is where the money is and where the litigation is coming from.
Ohio – simply put, the COA bump increases the number of dollars in the baseball team’s scholarship pizza pie. The coach can cut that pie up into however many or few slices he wants to. So long as he does not exceed one pizza pie. With the extra money, he can perhaps squeeze in another few slices as compared to previous.
But the incremental dollars involved are trivial. A fully funded baseball team gets 12 schollies to split amongst 35 guys.
Here’s an article from San Diego about Mountain West (a none P5 that is allowing schools to give the stipend) and PAC 12. I know at least a few of the schools went with a higher stipend as Colorado State and the two Utah teams are at amounts over $3500. Pretty open as to what the schools can do.
A coach could decide just to make the stipend a part of the scholarship, so if a scholarship is valued at $25k per year, it’s now valued at $27,500 and if you get 10% of it, you now get $2750 instead of $2500 (and on the bill it will say $2500 in tuition, $250 stipend). Some teams do have a limit on how many players the team can have, and how many non-scholarship players they can have. Baseball has a minimum amount for scholarships. Most sports have as a minimum ‘book money’ to be a scholarship player and sign the NLI. I know DU men’s lacrosse had 48 players on the team this year, but at least half of them were not scholarship players. You can only dice the scholarship so fine before it is meaningless (and better to take the need based aid if available).
I still say a baseball team going from 12 to 14 scholarships is significant. I can’t imagine many coaches would turn the extra players down. To put it simply, the issues around splitting the scholarship “pie” are exactly the same as they have always been. It is just a bigger pie now.
The average college baseball schollie is worth 6 grand and is a 32% ride. If you increase that value by 10%, it still is peanuts.
In the low partial sports like baseball, getting a “scholarship” has almost nothing to do with economics. It is primarily about pride – “Did you hear that Johnny got a scholarship to play baseball at State U!!” But the proud parents usually don’t mention that Johnny’s scholarship is worth like 500 bucks as a freshman.
Oh, I’ve heard the parents bragging about the ‘full ride’ athletic scholarships when I know full well that the scholarship is not full, not even half. My daughter has a teammate whose father went on and on about the full ride in front of the high school parents, and I know the top scholarship from the team was about 1/3 of COA. The girl might have had other funding that added up to full COA, but it wasn’t athletic money.
I got over it. Sort of.
The stipends are going to be given at the big schools, not in D2, and probably not at schools that have tight budgets in D1. I don’t think it will be enough money in the non-head count sports to matter.
If it doesn’t matter, then schools are not going to offer it for equivalency sports. It is not like Purdue let’s say wants to just spend an extra 500k a year for the heck of it.
NCAA D1 rules limit the number of partial Baseball scholarships to 27 and the athletic financial aid for each partial scholarship must be equal to or greater than 25% of a full scholarship.
Women’s swimming has a limit of 14 equivalent scholarships and teams are limited to 17 swimmers for conference and national championship meets.
“If it doesn’t matter, then schools are not going to offer it for equivalency sports. It is not like Purdue let’s say wants to just spend an extra 500k a year for the heck of it.”
I recall some of the conferences suggesting that they would only paying the full COA stipends to those athletes who were otherwise on full rides. It would save the schools money and really didn’t make all that much difference to the kids receiving partial schollies.
But that concept creates a title ix issue since the head count sports trend 2-1 male. So the schools probably have to pay partial COA stipends to at least all of the female athletes on partial schollies. If they are going to pay the female partials, they probably would pay the male partials too.
No Athletic Director is going to risk federal funds termination due to title IX violations.
Most of the current high school seniors who are going to have athletic scholarships in equivalent sports have already signed a NLI. This means that the talent pool for adding additional athletes is much weaker. The best way for a college to meet title IX funding requirements for this year is to follow Virginia Tech’s lead and give a COA increase to all equivalent athletes. In later years the colleges that give COA increases will recruit better athletes than colleges that do not.
Some conferences are requiring the COA stipend go to all athletes. I don’t think there is an requirement that it be in proportion to the scholarship. Perhaps an athletic director could say every athlete gets $1000 rather than some getting $2000 and some getting $100. The easiest way would seem to be to get the stipends in proportion to the percentage of scholarships.
I do think at the beginning they were all thinking that everyone would get the full stipend. When the real numbers came out that it would cost $1m to give the stipends to everyone, then the idea of a percentage came in.
